As a foreign correspondent, Hamish Macdonald has covered conflicts and natural disasters in dangerous and challenging locations all over the world, but reporting on the new year bushfires in NSW presented a new level of intensity.
Macdonald grew up in Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains and the south coast is close to his heart.
He was holidaying at Tathra but was forced to moved to Bega as fires threatened communities along the coast and also in the mountains.
People he knew and loved were at risk.
'"It was unusual to be covering a disaster that feels so close to home," Macdonald recalls.
"I spent a lot of my childhood summers here and I know a lot of people here.
"In the middle of it all Dad was being evacuated from Jindabyne, so I was coordinating all of that for him and that was pretty tough for Dad, like it is for so many people.
"It's not just about a fire sweeping through, it's about the devastation that it's brought to these communities and will be with them for weeks, months and years."
Gathered with evacuees at the Bega Showgrounds, Macdonald tweeted video of a threatening red sky and from then on, for a week after, was reporting on the disaster for multiple ABC platforms and hosting live news coverage.
While those eerie images were alarming, it is what Macdonald has witnessed since that has stayed with him.
"The thing that stands out for me compared to other disasters or calamitous situations I have covered is the scale of this," he says.
"It's really hard for people to imagine until you come here and drive through it. We are not just talking about a couple of communities or a couple of pockets of land that have been burnt out.
"You can literally drive for hours through burnt-out territory and it goes on and on and on."
Macdonald has been back to Bega and fire-devastated towns such as Cobargo in preparation for Monday's Q+A bushfire special and a Four Corners program, Black Summer — Stories from the front lines of Australia's bushfire crisis.
The stretches of burnt bush and homes reduced to rubble are highly visible. Less so, Macdonald has found, is the impact on the people in fire-affected communities living with unrelenting danger.
"There's an enormous physical dimension to this but also a huge and almost immeasurable dimension, which is the time and the mental duress people are under.
"There are people who have been immediately and acutely impacted by the fires and there are today people who are evacuating their homes for the fifth or sixth time since new year.
"You just can't imagine what that's like.
"I spoke to a woman in Cobargo who talks about becoming hyper-vigilant.
"Every hot day she sits next to a scanner listening for the nearest fire breaking out that's not yet on the RFS app because the fire that approached her home on New Year's Eve wasn't warned about on the app. Her dog woke her at 4:00am and they got to safety.

When people ask a question, it’s my job to get it answered

The ongoing risk from the fires has meant the special Q+A bushfire program that was planned to be broadcast from Bega has had to be relocated to Queanbeyan.
The venue that had been booked is now needed as an evacuation centre.
Bushfires are still the focus of the program, which is Macdonald’s first as the new presenter of Q+A.
Increasingly this year, the program will go to the people, moving out of the studio and into the regions and suburbs
Macdonald is replacing Tony Jones, who steered the program for 12 years and is moving to Beijing with wife Sarah Ferguson, the China correspondent for ABC News.
Macdonald is also presenting RN Breakfast on Friday mornings and will do some reporting for Foreign Correspondent.
"It's obviously a huge privilege to host a show like Q+A," he says.
"Tony Jones [and creator/executive producer Peter McEvoy] built something valuable in the national conversation and we live in times where that conversation is needed more than ever.
"I enjoy having conversations and I like listening. I think listening is the most fundamental but least-seen role of my job.
"It's a big responsibility to be the person who moderates those conversations, but I take on the responsibility with my usual approach. I want to do this well."
It is one of the toughest gigs in journalism — live television can be unpredictable, the program has at times been controversial, and it is under intense scrutiny — but Macdonald has filled in before and knows how to keep the conversation on track.
"Being live TV, it's a bit of a high-wire act," he says.
"Anything can and does happen.
"I know there are challenges. It's a show which is in part about opinion and also a show that people have opinions of.
"I see myself as a facilitator to make sure their questions are answered.
"There's a huge appetite for accountability from our leaders and my job is to make sure when people put a question it gets answered with a fair degree of frankness and honesty."

Macdonald always wanted to be a journalist

Ever since he was a child, Macdonald has been asking questions and journalism was a natural fit.
"I love a chat," he says.
"I don't remember. It's one of the stories Dad tells but I'm never sure how much veracity there is in Dad's stories.
"Growing up in the mountains I spent a lot of time in the ski fields and one of things I learnt there and [while] working in Mum and Dad's shops as a kid was that you could learn a lot about people and the world by talking to them, and journalism for me has always been a mechanism for learning."
Macdonald started out covering politics in Canberra with regional broadcaster WIN, but he was keen to see the world and after working for the UK's Channel 4 News in London he landed a gig as a foreign correspondent with the Middle East-based news network Al Jazeera English. He was 24.
Later Macdonald worked for American ABC as international affairs correspondent.
"When I first became a foreign correspondent, it was a very steep learning curve," he says.
"You suddenly found yourself away on very long reporting trips for weeks and months on end, in very remote places.
"I realised how self-reliant you needed to be. You have a lot of responsibility to yourself and to the team you are working with.
"My first assignment was to PNG.
"Al Jazeera English was a new thing and they didn't really have much sense of what they were doing.
"They gave me a big bundle of $US50,000 in cash and you were on your way and just filed stories as best you could."

The journalist becomes the story

During that first assignment Macdonald himself unexpectedly became front-page news.
"We went to Bougainville to do a story on the people of Carteret atoll, who are expected to become the first climate-change refugees, and the fixer we used kept disappearing and we couldn't figure out where she was disappearing to.
"This was the very beginning of Al Jazeera English, we weren't even on air yet and there were a lot of questions about what Al Jazeera was, the Bush administration was calling it 'terror TV' and it turned out this fixer was also working as a stringer for the local PNG Post Courier, which is the national newspaper, and was disappearing to take photos from a distance of us working.
"We later found ourselves on the front page of the national newspaper with this big expose about Al Jazeera being in PNG and talking to rebels."
In the years after, Macdonald covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine, the nuclear disaster in Japan, uprisings in Hong Kong and Egypt, the London bombings and the rise of Islamic State.
"The Japanese tsunami is the story that has stayed with me as much as any other," he says.
"It was not dissimilar to the fires in that it was a rolling disaster.
"It wasn't just one thing, not just a tsunami, not just an earthquake, not just a nuclear situation, it was all those things rolled into one and it happened over a period of time.

I was done with journalism

The unrelenting run of high-stress stories finally took its toll.
In 2014 his friend American journalist Steven Sotloff was beheaded by Islamic State fighters in Syria.
The demands and risks of the job no longer seemed worth it.
Macdonald walked away from journalism.
"I spent most of my 20s and early 30s as a foreign correspondent in conflict or disaster zones.
"When I was working with ABC America there was the war in Ukraine, ISIS was moving through Iraq, schoolgirls being kidnapped in Nigeria, outbreak of fighting in Gaza and it became an almost-permanent merry-go-round of difficult news stories and of course it has some impact after a while — it would be unthinkable that it doesn't have any impact — and I thought I was done with journalism."
He took a year out to do a fellowship at Harvard and pondered moving into business or foreign policy work.
The desire to ask questions and tell stories lured him back but with greater clarity about the kind of journalism he wanted to do.
"It is still something I am most passionate about and I ultimately found it impossible to walk away," he says.
"A big thing for me was that I wanted my journalism to be for an Australian audience rather than an American audience. I didn't feel any great connection telling those stories to an American audience in the way I feel a connection telling stories to an Australian audience.
"I do feel this work is important to do and I hope I can make a positive contribution."
Hamish Macdonald presents Black Summer on Four Corners at 8:30pm on Monday on ABC TV and iview, followed by a Q+A bushfire special at 9:35pm.